Science fiction vs. Fantasy

[jack]

One of the thoughts from Eastercon was an (inevitable) panel on the difference between Science Fiction and Fantasy. The panel didn't actually get very far, as it stalled on a big argument between Weston, who argued so vehemently for science fiction being about rationalistic extrapolation of science that everything else got caught in the cross-fire, but it raised lots of interesting ideas.

It's one of the ideas I've been mulling around in my head since. I've yet to come to any decisions, but preliminarily started considering a list of *potential* ways genres are defined.

1. Sometimes, like any other word, the definition is mainly a gut feeling thing, typically encapsulated by having most of a bunch of properties. For instance, filk is defined as something like "Originally songs made by fantasy/scifi fans, about scifi/fantasy, based on well-known
tunes, but now anything related to this."

2. If and only if they use one central concept. Eg. the murder mystery genre is pretty well defined. There's a murder. And one character investigates, and deduces the culprit. Or detective stories are much the same, but it doesn't have to be a murder. And both are very recognisable, both in terms of their own genres, a "detective novel", and in combination with others -- if you say "science-fiction detective story" everyone will know exactly what you mean and know if a book is, whether or not it's marketed as such.

3. If it includes certain background concepts, in the world or the plot. Eg. historical novels typically have certain kinds of plot, but plainly you can have a historical novel with any kind of plot and it'll fit in, and you typically have historical thrillers, historical romances, historical mysteries, etc, whichever they get categorised as.

Now we can guess how scifi and fantasy _could_ be related:

1. Are they two ends of a spectrum? Do they share a large category X, but fantasy has Y and scifi has not-Y?
2. Are they orthogonal? Does scifi do X and fantasy do Y, and typically a book has one or the other, but could have both?
3. Are they separate concepts with a gulf between, so you have core scifi and core fantasy, and in the middle you have things that are kind of like both but not really?

What defining characteristics of science fiction can we spot? Off the top of my head, suggestions that may or may not hold up:

1. I would say hard science fiction is defined by "the story is about the science" and "the science is related to real science" maybe more or less of either, but I think that's the core, with a more or less fuzzy nimbus around.
2. It often has spaceships
3. The universe is in principle analysable by rational principles
4. The universe actually *is* analysed by rational principles.
5. The core features of the book are a couple of central ideas (eg. "What if we could do X?" and "What if there were a war about it?") rather than extensive and beautiful world building.
6. Written by a science fiction author.
7. Having science which our current science could, in theory, approximate. ETA: By this, I meant what Pavanne described well.

The natural thing to do is examine edge cases. Obviously whatever the definitions you _can_ have fiction that does both, but there are many books which you feel ought to be one or the other, but is fuzzy. Do they feel to fall more on one side or the other, or to do both science-fiction and fantasy, or to not really be members of either? Several classic examples:

1. Flatworld. Completely made up, but utterly serving the explication of real science. Some fantasy involved? But completely and utterly science fiction.
2. Atrocity archives. It feels like science fiction, with some horror. The world is definitely science fiction -- they fear the unknown, but they fight back by knowing stuff and building gadgets. Again some trappings of fantasy.
3. Magic goes away. To me definitely feels like fantasy, and has the trappings of fantasy, but fulfils most of the definitions of science-fiction too.
4. Bujold. Classic space opera. There's some hard-ish science fiction in there in the imagination of how technologies would affect societies, but the real strengths are the characters.
5. Amber chronicles. Feels like fantasy, but has definite science fiction aspects too, they solve their problems partly by learning to poke the fabric of the universe.
6. Cryptonomicon. Arguably not either. Most people read Cryptonomicon and see a technothriller set entirely in real world physics. But it *feels* like science fiction.
7. Startrek. Clearly science fiction, but why? The science is mostly made up as they go along. Is it solely for the social commentary? :)
8. Starwars. Classic space opera? Yet is a perfect transplantation of a fantasy story to space.

I want the definition of "science fiction" to be whether its rationalistic or not. But this excludes space opera, and includes magic that works by clearly defined rules[1], which doesn't feel right to me. Contrariwise, if you just define science-fiction to be "has spaceships or stuff", that feels like a cop-out.

Nor am I sure if fantasy is an orthogonal axis or not. Dave's suggestion was that fantasy was the style of a book, orthogonal to it being science fiction. But I'm not yet sure.

OK, that was most of my thoughts to date. Hopefully I'll actually come to some conclusions in a bit :)

[1] Not most magic which claims to be. Maybe not even Dungeons and Dragons type, where it's supposed to be, but in fact its effect is very abstract. But magic where you really can say "Why don't they do X?" and then they do :)

Comments

[redbird]

The Incompleat Enchanter is the obvious example of "magic which works by clearly defined rules," of course. (Garrett's Lord Darcy stories, as well, but that's also genre-straddling because except for the alternate-world fantasy setting, they're straightforward detective fiction.)

ISTR that papersky had a distinction between sf and fantasy that had to do with flavor, and made sense to me.

Did anyone mention Samuel Delany's idea that science fiction is a set of reading protocols?

[fanf]

Both f & sf concern worlds that are further from reality than mainstream fiction. I think a key difference between f & sf is that sf imagines some kind of technological (and perhaps social) progress, whereas fantasy worlds are static. This explains fantasy's preoccupation with mediaeval societies. The progress in sf might be backwards (as in post-apocalyptic stories) or mixed (as in distopias). Perhaps the difference is clearest the closer the setting is to present-day reality.

[cartesiandaemon.livejournal.com]

Both f & sf concern worlds that are further from reality than mainstream fiction.

Yes, that sounds like a good description. (Although you may want to exclude alternate universe by requiring that either the technology or the physics be different from all points of our history.)

I think a key difference between f & sf is that sf imagines some kind of technological (and perhaps social) progress,

I know what you mean. But do you mean in the set up, or during the book? After all, Tolkien is about the overthrow of Sauron, and the change from magic to technology (and at least thematically is some of the time a supposed history of our current world), it's just that they do it by force of will rather than insight.

[fanf]

I think I mean the setup.

Perhaps alternate history is an intermediate genre, since it looks back (like fantasy often does) but it can be utopian/distopian like sf. There is also the sf subgenre of planetary fantasies, which I suppose is another way of setting up an alternate reality.

Of course the edges are blurry so drawing a sharp line between the two is a fool's game, even though arguing about where to draw it can be interesting and enlightening.

[pavanne.livejournal.com]

I think the difference is that science fiction is set in our universe, whereas fantasy is set in another universe.

This means that SF can't introduce something that is contrary to our observation of the universe. It can introduce something which is discovered or revealed to show that the universe is not as we thought it, but this must be consistent with what we have observed up to the present. Anything can happen in the future, but there must be the possibility that the past is as we see it (except in certain time-travel-paradox stories). SF isn't under obligation to show how we got from here to there, but it should be possible that we did or will.

Whereas in fantasy the rules can change and you can introduce 'new things' which are just completely against what we observe. People can fly, and can always have flown. Or things can be just slightly not as we see them, for example if fairies or ghosts exist.

By this definition you could shoehorn Star Wars into either, though the use of telekinetic and other mental powers by a specialised, highly trained elite does not necessarily contradict our view of the universe. Particularly if you treat the defining characteristic of the SW universe to be 'some rare people have limited telekinetic and other powers, and technology is a little ahead of our own plus FTL travel'.

[simont]

Although, of course, a notable subset of fantasy is apparently set in our multiverse, since it starts by having someone from our Earth stumble upon the one magic door that lets them through to the fantasy world. Often the rest of the magic in the fantasy world completely fails to work in our universe. I would say that The Chronicles of Amber, The Chronicles of Narnia, The Fionavar Tapestry and Mordant's Need are all at least as "consistent with what we have observed up to the present" as Star Wars is.

Mordant's Need is also an interesting case because a sizable amount of the plot revolves around continuing research into (the practical applications of) the magic system, and to some extent the ideas are things the reader could have thought of too. For this reason I've often felt that it has a slightly more SFy feel than most fantasy. (Also helped by the fact that the fantasy world is 100% secular, which is a pleasant change after all that fantasy with manifest gods.)

[cartesiandaemon.livejournal.com]

Yes, that was a distinction I was proud of articulating. I think you can patch up the AU problem (if it's mainly in one alternate universe, if that one is a continuation of ours, at least in the technology if not the history, or if it's about the hopping between universes, whether than hopping is sci-fi or fantasy).

However, what about urban fantasy? That the fantasy equivalent of technopunk, assuming that about five years in the future vampires are suddenly discovered to exist, and gives people who are angsty about special powers.

And what about flatland and utopian/dystopian fiction? I think those are plainly sci-fi as they're exploring a single idea designed to shed light on our own world. And the science they're illustrating is real, but the internal science is not.

[pavanne.livejournal.com]

Arg, urban fantasy. Sometimes it just has to depend on flavour? You have SF vampires and fantasy vampires. SF vampires are photophobic (particularly at certain wavelengths) and fantasy vampires are burned by daylight... I appreciate that's kind of subtle but you know what I mean.

Flatland would seem to be satirical fantasy, no? Whereas utopian/ dystopian would often be satirical SF?

And fanf mentioned steampunk, which I would still say is SF. It's still possible that the state of the world might change so that steampunkyness becomes preferred to cyberpunkyness/ current high-tech. Maybe not likely, but it's still recognisably our universe.

Most AU stuff where the rules of the multiverse turn out to be different from the rules of the universe is fantasy. So Diana Wynne Jones' Twelve Related Worlds multiverse novels are fantasy. Possibly if someone steps between the universes and says "hey, the sky is green - the atmospheric composition/ history of the Industrial Revolution/ Planck's constant must be different here!" it remains SF.

So much to read.

[rysmiel.livejournal.com]

However, what about urban fantasy? That the fantasy equivalent of technopunk, assuming that about five years in the future vampires are suddenly discovered to exist, and gives people who are angsty about special powers.

I think of those as fitting under the heading of secret history, really, and being more like the secret history/conspiracy genre than anything else in terms of how the world-shape feels. Mind you, most of the examples to come to mind do actually fall apart considered as secret histories, you can't roll them back or forward very far without the contrivances necessary to keep the consequences of the secret history from changing the direction of real history becoming overloaded. (Vary honourable exception is Mike Carey's Felix Castor series, the which I would heartily recommend; Castor is a medium-boiled North of England gumshoe/exorcist, in a world where ghosts coming back has been a very minor and occasional thing for all of history, but where some unexplained event in the mid-1990s, which the series is digging towards revealing, caused the frequency of ghosts to go up by several orders of magnitude; Carey has done some lovely worldbuilding in the classic SFnal mode of thinking through the consequences of this single change to the second and third order, and how people live with it, and his prose and characterisation skills are up to it.)

[fanf]

Interesting.

So by this definition, alternate history like Neal Stephenson's Baroque Cycle and the various steampunk books are fantasy, though their sensibilities are sfnal.

It also puts certain stories that contain speculative physics right on the borderline of sf. For example, Vernor Vinge invented the zones of thought he described in "a Fire Upon the Deep" to escape from his own problems with imagining past the singularity - they aren't intended to be real. There are plenty of stories that feature ftl drives or ansibles without any attempt to reconcile the tropes with known science.

[naath.livejournal.com]

There is at least one element to the Baroque Cycle and Cryptonomicon that makes them clearly *not* in the category of "plausible in our universe"; I don't think that makes something "not SF" on it's own, because I think things like Fire Upon the Deep are SF, on the other hand Stephenson never bothers to attempt to explain/justify that change to the world in terms of any sort of Science.

I think those novels are very hard to categorise - they aren't "historical" because historical novels generally try not to overly much change the world; I don't think "alternate history" work, because generally "alternate history" suggests that one thing is changed and then its consequences explored - I'm not really convinced that that's what Stephenson was doing, the changes to the overall flow of history are minimal. It reads like SF because people are always explaining cool science stuff to each other, it doesn't read like fantasy because no-one seems to be really interacting with the more fantastical elements.

I'm also not sure I've read anything else that would fall in to the same category - although possibly 1610 a Sundial in a Grave (Mary Gentle) might fit.

It lives on my SF&F shelf, because Stephenson is an SF&F author and I don't have anywhere better to put it...

[cartesiandaemon.livejournal.com]

I think Cryptonomicon is a fascinating example even apart from the discussion, because he's plainly scifi, but it's very hard justifying that.

Apart from the one element[sic], they're basically real world (or maybe technothriller), but feel like scifi, and I don't think that addition does change it, just adds a little icing.

I'm not sure why. Perhaps that it's so little, or perhaps that the characters approach the anomaly in a science fiction way, or perhaps that even if it were fantasy, the book seems to support an inevitable and good ascendence of fantasy over it.

FWIW, one theory has that in the Future sequel, the element will be explained to come from a science-fiction source after all.

[naath.livejournal.com]

I kept expecting that it would be explained (or at least that the characters would come up with a scientific explanation)... that was a bit disappointing really.

It's a History-Of-Science novel I think, which there aren't many of. Maybe that can come under SF - but rather than being about some scientific thing it's about the very process of science and how that emerged from what we had before.

[cartesiandaemon.livejournal.com]

I think the first time I read them I didn't really pick up what was going on enough to have an opinion...

:)

It's a History-Of-Science novel I think, which there aren't many of. Maybe that can come under SF

Another point I made before was a lot of the novels that feel like a "classic" (either traditional classics, or modern novels which feel like that) do what they do and let other people worry about categories, so often the most prominent are difficult to place.

I think the contemporary parts are technothriller, and as you say, the historical parts "history of maths" (and both could have been set in the real world if Stephenson could hold himself back), but what's really defining is the style, which is all scifi...

[rysmiel.livejournal.com]

I kept expecting that it would be explained (or at least that the characters would come up with a scientific explanation)... that was a bit disappointing really.

I have a theory that it more or less has, but it involves real book-destroying level spoilers for Cryptonomicon; what would be the best way to proceed if I wished to lay that out here ?

[cartesiandaemon.livejournal.com]

(Responses to other cogent points later, but) I suggest making a post yourself and linking to it, with cut text "no, seriously, spoilers" or "no, seriously, speculation spoilers, even if you've read it" cut tags as appropriate :)

(I also owe a post about thoughts about cryptonomicon, arising from conversations with mair, after she found a site that did thje best job I've seen of collating various theories.)

[naath.livejournal.com]

Hmm, tricky. I've read it - and can't immediately think what you mean but of course I read C. before I read the Baroque Cycle so I wasn't looking out for it...

[cartesiandaemon.livejournal.com]

FWIW I think of the Baroque cycle as notionally supposed to fit into "what could be really going on in our universe" and be consistent with it, even if the Stephenson's flamboyancy sometimes means it couldn't actually.

And Vinge... I think it is supposed to be consistent with what we see, right? We're in the slow zone, and eventually colonise a swathe of it, and can never detect the zones. But I admit the books would work equally well if they didn't.

But yes, those borderline cases are the problems for this definition.

[rysmiel.livejournal.com]

The thing about the Slow Zone is that it's an answer to an extremely nebulous and hypothetical problem; if you believe with genuinely messianic zeal that the Singularity is universal, imminent and inevitable, you need to come up with a construct preventing it from happening if you want to play with relatively high-tech societies that exist long enough to communicate and exchange spaceships and so on.

[naath.livejournal.com]

But there exist fantasy books where you eventually find out that *actually* what happened is that 1000 years prior to the story a bunch of humans came in a space ship and colonised this world, which happens to have alien creatures that are a lot like ghosts/fairies/dragons etc. or alien drugs that can cause people to be psychic or etc. etc.

Some of the stories in these world feel like fantasy, some of the stories feel like SF.

[rysmiel.livejournal.com]

I'm trying to popularise the term "fantasy with SF underwear" for this subgenre, myself, because it's a very real edge case but not always well distinguished from the other very different edge cases between SF and fantasy. [ And also because it lets me consider The Book of the New Sun as a 1940s Lili St.-Cyr burlesque routine. ]

[rjw76]

Erm. Please may I be a little rude and ask you to put entries this long behind a cut? I enjoyed reading it, but it's making scrolling up and down my friends page a tad annoying now I have...

Also, *hugs*

[cartesiandaemon.livejournal.com]

Whoops, ok. I think I always feel "it can't be that long, I haven't got anywhere yet", which is unfortunately contrary to actual fact *hug* :)

[simont]

I think, for me, the key similarity between sf and fantasy is that both are set in worlds where you can do cool stuff – fly to the stars, build nanotech and/or strong AI, levitate by power of mind, spit fire from your fingertips, create platefuls of food with a wave of your hand. This is what makes reading either of them a nice change from the real world in which conservation of energy, technological limitations, the absence of any telekinetic facility in our brains, and (in extreme cases) the light-speed limit and the uncertainty principle tend to prevent us from doing anything seriously cool.

The key difference is in the character of the cool stuff: in sf, it's all done by science, and in fantasy, it's magic. So for me, the question boils down to asking, what's the difference between science and magic?

Well, in the real world science and magic are difficult to even confuse in the first place, since the former actually works and the latter is poorly specified fiction or myth; but when the science becomes fictitious and the magic starts working, one has to find a new basis on which to draw the dividing line.

I'm sure there are difficult borderline cases, but I think the key point for me is that science is basically reductive whereas magic is holistic.

A scientific effect is one which basically occurs at the level of atoms, or fundamental particles, or space-time (even if the actual atoms or particles in question don't exist in real science – unobtainium, tachyons, hyperspace, polarised neutron flow), and macroscopic effects on people, chairs, planets etc are emergent consequences of those rules. Even if the author doesn't actually do the analysis to show you how the macroscopic effects you're seeing are emergent consequences of uniformly applied physical principles, the character of the macroscopic effects tends to be such that you can figure out as much detail as you need for yourself.

By contrast, magic tends to operate fundamentally on macroscopic things like "human being". Suppose someone casts a magic spell on a person, for instance, which prevents them from moving outside a circle drawn on the floor, but which is fine with air and food and other stuff moving across that circle, and can stop the person jumping over the circle but is somehow fine with people walking around the general area on the floor above. If you try to think up a scientific implementation of all of that behaviour, it's very difficult to come up with one which forbids all the right things and permits all the right things – not least because a lot of the concepts involved are so nebulous. (The air breathed out by the person can clearly cross the line; can their skin flakes? Their nail clippings? Their nails while attached, which are after all already dead? Can they reach past the circle with a hand-held tool? Why that but not their fingernails?) The best you can typically do, if trying to implement magic by means of science, is to postulate a sentience somewhere to oversee the spell: give it a bunch of powers to apply physical forces and manipulate microscopic concepts, and tell it to use its best judgment in deciding what to forbid and permit. Magic is AI-complete.

So is Star Wars sf or fantasy? I think it's an overlapping of both, because it has both science (hyperspace, energy weapons) and magic (the Force). In the prequels, of course, Lucas attempted to make the Force become science as well by inventing the clearly scientific midichlorians as carriers of it; but the reason this failed to work (thankfully) is because whatever the cause of the Force, its effects are still magical, since they operate at the level of "emotion", "presence of a particular person", "danger to someone's health", "millions of people dying".

[cartesiandaemon.livejournal.com]

Ah! I think you've nailed it. I don't think cool stuff is necessarily involved, but that's what makes it worth reading, and I think classifying the departures from reality in terms of science or magic is the way to go.

I was edging towards it with rules like "in principle subject to rational analysis" but it was hedged about with too many caveats.

I think this description fits what I want for all the edge cases, so I want to accept it. Describing it in terms of science and magic reduces it to another question we've debated before, but I think a question (a) we have a better intuition about (b) we've more answers for and (c) more fundamental.

There are lots of edge cases between science and magic, but we can generally decide where things ought to go. And it explains why there are different sorts of edge cases of books -- some are edge cases because they have both science and magic, some have cool stuff which is not clear if it's magic or science.

[cartesiandaemon.livejournal.com]

And I think your characterisation of the difference between science and magic is good, although I think there's probably more to say; the question came up most recently in connection to Clarke's Law and I don't think we've quite settled it yet, though I think we have a good handle on it.

I once envisaged a story series (I never got as far as writing anything) where people lived in a matrix-like world and deduced they were doing so because they noticed psychic powers granted special status to units of people, and correctly deduced this would only work if the universe was set up for the benefit of people specifically, and with some more poking, deduced these powers were due to bugs in optimisation routines, etc.

There are two natural edge cases to poke at. The first is magic which does follow emergent rules. (This is practically the same thing as being subject to rational study, as although you can in theory study holistic things, you hit constant edge cases...) But this seems quite rare, almost all the examples which *claim* to follow rules are actually much better explained holistically. The most blatant example is roleplaying. Imagine how cool a roleplaying game would be if you could mung magic at the lowest level, and it was balanced to say "OK, I combine spell X and spell Y and get effect Z" as people playing roleplaying games always want to do. However, in almost all cases, that can't *actually* work, what you actually have is limited to predetermined list of spells, or DM's intuition, and it's defined mostly in terms of the effect it has on a person in a sword-fight.

Pl: I summon a rhinoceroses. INTO HIS LEFT VENTRICLE
DM: You can't do that.

Magic that affects people is harder than any other sort. (In extreme cases, some things are immune to most magic, full stop.)

[rysmiel.livejournal.com]

There are two natural edge cases to poke at. The first is magic which does follow emergent rules. (This is practically the same thing as being subject to rational study, as although you can in theory study holistic things, you hit constant edge cases...) But this seems quite rare, almost all the examples which *claim* to follow rules are actually much better explained holistically.

This is a notion that fascinates me, and I am working on a couple of projects in this direction, but I would suggest as interesting related examples the small genre of "alternate science" stories. Things like Ted Chiang's "Seventy-Two Letters", or Richard Garfinkle's Celestial Matters, which is set in a universe that works according to Aristotelian physics and has developed technology based on that to the point of space travel. Or arguably Walter Jon Williams' Metropolitan and City on Fire, though it's strongly suggested that the milieu there [ basically Trantor with the addition of feng shui-type magic as a utility, stuck behind an impenetrable Shield ] has been set up from outside, and it does not look like the culminating volume of that will ever see the light of day, alas.

[cartesiandaemon.livejournal.com]

Thank you immensely for all the books you mentioned in comments to this, they all sound fascinating :)

[cartesiandaemon.livejournal.com]

The other obvious example is science that is effectively magic, ie. "travels at the speed of plot". Or startrek phasers which annihilate one contiguous object. But in some fashion they are generally recognisable as supposed to be science.

[naath.livejournal.com]

I think that's a good starting point - and it makes it clear that whilst Greg Egan writes SF, Robert Jordan wrote Fantasy, but we knew that anyway (but now we can codify it).

I don't think this sort of line can always be easily drawn - there are books where magic is done in a very sciencey sort of way (New Crobuzon for instance) and in other cases SCIENCE comes over as very fantasy because the details are clearly just not there (popular SFy TV shows come to mind like Firefly, Star Trek, etc.).

[rysmiel.livejournal.com]

There is this huge space of all possible stories, which is fantasy, within which there is the tiny corner of stories which follow a certain set of rules within a certain worldview, which is science fiction.

And if you zoom right in on that tiny corner of SF universes that could happen, you find one infinitesimal grain in the middle of it which is the universe that did happen, which is all of mainstream literature.

[cartesiandaemon.livejournal.com]

:)

I know exactly what you mean, (although I think the comparison isn't quite fair in that unfettered imagination doesn't seem as unboundedly positive as it makes it sound :)).

[rysmiel.livejournal.com]

SF is largely attitude. I think it was nancylebov who proposed that it's SF if the unknown is to be explained, it's horror if the unknown is to be feared, and one for fantasy which I do not remember.

There's definitely something to that. The bestsellery technothriller with quasi-SFnal McGuffin, as epitomised by Michael Crichton, differs fundamentally from real SF in that in real SF new things are to be explored and understood and their consequences considered, whereas in the Crichton technothriller they are to be locked away or destroyed, with associated muttering about Frankenstein and hubris. I find this attitude philosophically despicable, fwiw.

Cryptonomicon is then, to my mind, a historical novel about people with SF worldviews, and that is what makes it feel like it belongs with SF. The Baroque Cycle possibly more complicatedly so as the origin of that worldview is among the things he is playing with, but that wonderful metaphor of the reverse shipwreck really captures something core about that.

[naath.livejournal.com]

"Historical Novels" as a genre tend to take rather fewer liberties with the sort of changes to the world that push novels out of the world we actually live in - they generally stick to filling in the blanks between actual historical events (for real historical personages) or inventing Joe and Jane Ordinary to illustrate the period.

I guess that the question of whether the Baroque Cycle and Cryptonomicon *is* a historical novel would depend (to me) on whether there characters in it are correct or whether there is some Rational Explanation which Stephenson has so far declined to provide that would allow these events to Actually Have Happened without requiring serious changes to our understanding of how the world works (or of course on whether the facts as presented in the novel are actually true in the real world).

Books that fit into similar niches (IMO) are things like "1610 a Sundial in a Grave" and Scot Card's "Women of Genesis" series. I don't know where they should go really.

[cartesiandaemon.livejournal.com]

SF is largely attitude. I think it was nancylebov who proposed that it's SF if the unknown is to be explained, it's horror if the unknown is to be feared, and one for fantasy which I do not remember.

Yes, I like that a lot. (I think I was groping towards something like that with the ideas of being subjected to rational analysis by the characters in the universe.) I think with Simon's definition that possibly encapsulates it.

in the Crichton technothriller they are to be locked away or destroyed,

Oh, hm. That is true, isn't it? I hadn't noticed, because obviously I'm in general in favour of "exploring and understanding", but am always happy for an individual book to be about a different theme I mightn't always want, but all the Crichton books I know are that way round and I hadn't noticed :(